Pontefract Solar Output Month by Month: When Does a Home Battery Actually Fill?

ElectriFusion Solutions · 15 October 2026

A Pontefract household asking whether a battery is worth it usually gets an annual kWh figure in reply, which is the one number that does not answer the question. What matters is the month. This is a south-facing Pontefract roof, every month, from the European Commission's PVGIS model.

A 4.85 kW array in Pontefract, every month

PVGIS 5.2, SARAH2 radiation database, Pontefract town-centre coordinates, south-facing at 35°, 14% system losses, fetched 15 October 2026. Annual total 4,698 kWh (969 kWh per kW), about 1.2% less than Doncaster. Modelled averages, not a guarantee for any particular roof.

The best month here is May at 589 kWh (19.0 kWh a day) and the worst is Dec at 161 kWh (5.2 kWh a day), a ratio of 3.7 to one; that ratio, not the annual total, is what a battery has to live with.

For scale: PVGIS puts the in-plane irradiation on that roof at about 1,191 kWh per square metre a year, and the array converts it to 969 kWh per installed kilowatt; a Pontefract household with the regional average evening load would see the battery cycle fully on about 214 days a year on these figures.

What that means for the battery

Take daytime usage off the top and a 5 kWh battery fills on days the roof makes about 10 kWh or more. In Pontefract that is Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep on the monthly averages. A 10 kWh battery is a 16 kWh-a-day proposition from solar alone, which here means Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug.

From November to January the average is 5.8 kWh a day. A house that runs a fridge, a router, a kettle and some lighting through the day uses most of that as it arrives, so the battery sees a few hundred watt-hours of surplus, not five kilowatt-hours. That is not a fault with the battery or the panels; it is the latitude.

That something else is the grid

Winter battery value in Pontefract comes from the tariff: charge at the overnight rate, run the house through the 4pm to 7pm peak, and the roof's contribution is a bonus. In summer the roles reverse. Either way the arithmetic is the difference between the two rates multiplied by what the battery shifts in a day, which is why the tariff is the first thing we ask about.

Count each day once. A battery that filled overnight has no room for the morning's solar surplus, so on a summer day the saving is the solar or the tariff, not both added together.

So what size for a Pontefract home?

The evening load decides it. Pull a week of half-hourly smart-meter data: if the house uses 4 to 6 kWh between dusk and midnight, 5 kWh is the size; an EV or heat pump pushes it to 10 kWh, and in Pontefract that larger unit is working for the overnight tariff more than for the roof. Registration with the network, standalone options and the models we fit are on battery storage Pontefract; the solar side is on solar panels in Pontefract.

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